Human consciousness: a tragic misstep?

“Man is a tragic animal. Not because of his smallness, but because he is too well endowed. Man has longings and spiritual demands that reality cannot fulfil. We have expectations of a just and moral world. Man requires meaning in a meaningless world.”   I bet very few people would guess the author of this quote in an existentialism pub quiz.   Its belongs to the 20th century Norwegian philosopher and mountaineer Peter Wessel Zapffe, and unlike most existentialists, Zapffe was a true pessimist.   You see, most existentialists, starting with Nietzsche, and moving on to the likes of Sartre and Camus, saw the meaninglessness of the universe as liberating, as an opportunity to be the authors of our own meaning, rather than be burdened with some “objective”, God-given purpose. Not Zapffe.   Taking a leaf out of an (admittedly controversial) anecdote about evolution, Zapffe argued that just as the Irish elk that roamed through Eurasia 2.6 million years ago grew antlers too heavy, and too burdensome to sustain, so too, us humans, are victims of evolution. Evolution is blind, mutations happen randomly, and while the results in our case might not be threatening the species with extinction, according to Zapffe, they are responsible for the crappiness of the human condition: a state of constant dissatisfaction with the world.   Nature endowed us not with antlers disproportional to our size and strength, but with minds out of sync with reality. Humans, according to Zapffe, have more consciousness than we can handle. We are too aware of the state of the world and the suffering, injustice, and cruelty within it, and what is more, we long for a world that is free of all those ills. We crave a just, harmonious, peaceful world, and at the same time, we are conscious that this can never be a reality. We literally have a name for those imaginary places where all is just and good: utopias, the non-places, translated from Greek.   Self-consciousness is also a bummer, according to Zapffe. We are too aware not just of the world, but of ourselves. We are conscious of our own mortality, the finitude of our abilities, of our potential legacy when we eventually, certainly, die. And for what? What’s the point of it all? There is none, Zapffe argues. This is the human tragedy: by our very nature, we desire what doesn’t exist, meaning.   If this all rings kind of true to you, don’t worry. Zapffe offers a list of copings mechanisms we can use in response to this less-than-ideal situation: isolate ourselves from the world, focus on some ideal or value to distract ourselves, or try that very Freudian/Nietzschean of tasks: to sublimate suffering into something of aesthetic value.   Cold comfort, you might think. But there is always the possibility that Zapffe was just wrong. Evolutionary existentialism might make some valid points, but does it really capture the full scope of human experience? Excessive consciousness can be a curse, but it can also be a blessing. If overthinking things is so bad, why do philosophers spend so much time perfecting it?   Alexis Papazoglou

 

The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life & Work (Works)

by 

Joseph Campbell,

 

Phil Cousineau (Editor)

The author of Hero With a Thousand Faces, The Masks of God series, and The Power of Myth here turns his powers of observation and analysis on his own life's journey and conveys the excitement of his life-long exploration of mythic traditions, which he called "the one great story of mankind."

In conversations with poets, anthropologists, and philosophers, Campbell reflects on subjects ranging from the origins and functions of myth, the role of the artist and the need for ritual, to the ordeals of love and romance. Illustrated throughout with photographs from Joseph Campbell's family archive and with a new, revised introduction, The Hero's Journey introduces the reader first-hand to Joseph Campbell the man, his discoveries, his terminology, and his thinking.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/242530.The_Hero_s_Journey?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=qprnc6lTmA&rank=1

EWR My personal notes February 1

The heroes journey is about leaving the dependency of childhood. It's about the transformation of death and resurrection. It's losing yourself giving yourself over to transformation by trial. It's going beyond yourself.

The world is full of people who have stopped listening to themselves

Put yourself in situations that evoke your higher spirit.

It's important to live life as a mystery.

It's about saying yes to the adventure of living.

Dragons represent the binding of oneself to one's ego, to be trapped in a cage. The ego is too small it pins us down and makes us do what others want us to do. The antidote is to "follow your bliss".

"In primitive societies the violence delivered to young men in their teens is prodigious and is taming them. The young man is a compulsively violent piece of biology and you've got to integrate that. People talk about looking for the meaning of life; what you're really looking for is an experience of life. In one of the experiences is a good fight."

"in so far as you take the religion seriously, you're living in an immediate relationship to myth; and the problem then is to relate your experiences when you move into the world to this mythological ground, to see the world in terms of those structures which have been put into you in the beginning."

Chakras: the lower chakras are the physical source of power and strength – the upper one of intellect in mind – the heart is the center.

Samsara: there's a place of rest in yourself, a quiet place where the action comes from. A center that must be held. When you are not compelled by desire or fear or social commitments, that is Nirvana.

Campbell's definition of myth: "Transparent to the transcendent". "Mythology opens the world so that it becomes transparent to something that is beyond speech, beyond words, in short, to do what we call transcendence."..." The energies of the universe, the energies of life, that come in the subatomic particle displays that science shows us, are operative. The ultimate ground of being transcends definition, transcends our knowledge. When you ask about ultimates you're asking about something that transcends all the categories of thought, the categories of being and non-being. And the experience is the experience of a truth. An intuitive experience that disregards time in space."

 A Hidden Wholeness  Parker Palmer

Summary from Goodreads

In A Hidden Wholeness, Parker Palmer reveals the same compassionate intelligence and informed heart that shaped his best-selling books Let Your Life Speak and The Courage to Teach. Here he speaks to our yearning to live undivided lives--lives that are congruent with our inner truth--in a world filled with the forces of fragmentation. Mapping an inner journey that we take in solitude and in the company of others, Palmer describes a form of community that fits the limits of our active lives. Defining a "circle of trust" as "a space between us that honors the soul," he shows how people in settings ranging from friendship to organizational life can support each other on the journey toward living "divided no more."

…

A Hidden Wholeness weaves together four themes that its author has pursued for forty years: the shape of an integral life, the meaning of community, teaching and learning for transformation, and nonviolent social change. 

My thoughts

For me this book was about trust. Trust as foundational to our humanity, trust as the virtue that potentiates all other virtues, trust as the sine qua non of human relatedness and cultural cohesion.  Trust in the same sense that Erik Erikson use the term: to describe the basis for our ontological sense of being in the world. Trusting others but above all trusting oneself. Healing our self by learning to listen to the inner voice, and trusting that the voice will reveal our truth to ourselves. 

And trusting the process, in this case The Circle of Trust which he developed and promoted over the course of his long career. I found myself wanting to join such a circle and then realizing that I already have relationships and communities that honor the principles of the Circles, even if we don’t acknowledge it explicitly. 

Our discussion

Our discussion called into question some of the terminology Palmer uses to explore and expound upon this issue of trust. What is he referring to when he says “soul”? What does it really mean to listen to the soul? How does God fit into this whole picture? 

There was the sense also, in our discussion, that Palmer’s gentle, affirmative, uncritical way off encountering life can’t withstand the “sturm und drang” of the world as it actually is, with all its conflicts, violence, and rapaciousness. Is it realistic or even possible to think about circles of trust being the basis for transformative change? Where do controversy, argument, and confrontation fit in?